Project: Interactive Sculpture

Medium: Wood, Electronics, RFID

Installation Size: 5 m X 5 m

StarWay is an interactive sculpture where people can change the sculpture the more they interact with it.

Standing over fifteen feet tall, StarWay appears to have been thrown to earth with two of its points fixed firmly into the ground.

Each of the two hundred and twenty star light up under a bank of uv inblue, green and yellow. However, StarWay is interactive and each one of StarWay’s stars light up internallyif you are in possession of a ‘wishing star’.  These ‘wishing stars’ once presented and placed on the ‘wishing star console’  (that sits in front Starway), results in one of the stars on StarWay to light up in pink. Once the wish is make the star that lit up for you will return to shining white but it shines that little bit brighter as a result of your interacting with it.

An oversized ammunition box tells the story of a man and his gun.

Dd’s Faded Glory represents the ebb and flow of conversations on Twitter around Russia’s suspected interference in the USA Elections of November 2016 and the subsequent fallout, such as the congressional hearings and the Mueller investigation.  Taking its feed from the live Twitter API the conversations are simplified to a positive or negative statement about Russia’s alleged interference.  The more negative the conversations, the stronger the Russian flag shines through the Stars and Stripes until it eclipses Old Glory completely. Combining textiles using a devoré technique to distress the fabric the work is combined with LED’s and electronics and a twitter feed. 

Project: Knife Nation

Medium: Fabric, Cotton

Interactive Installation Size: 7m X 2m

The Saint George’s Cross, the emblem of England,  is stitched into flags of differing sizes, each stitch representing the number of recorded crimes involving a knife or sharp implement in selected regions in England in 2013-14.

Threads trail, left hanging in anticipation of more crimes yet to be committed, the installation never quite complete, awaiting new data ready for the stitching to resume. Each flag’s dimensions vary drastically, as the relative area of each flag corresponds to the crimes per 100,000 population. Each stitch corresponds to the absolute number of crimes per region.

London’s flag size is distinctly larger in size than any of the others flags in the seriesdue its large population, yet the entire canvas is covered in stitches, reflecting the reporting of over 10076 incidents that year.

Contrast this with Surrey, showing the lowest number of incidents,  the forty three knife crimes in the region barely completing a stitched one-line cross.

There are 38 regions in the UKand Knife Crime focuses on five of them. London, 10,076*; the second largestGreater Manchester,  1643;  the smallest Surrey and two other regions, Essex, 43: 531 and Devon and Cornwall, 301.

This piece was produced in collaboration with data researcher Miriam Quick.

The flags are based on data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS)

*London Metropolitan area (10076) plus the City of London (14 crimes)

Exhibition: Knife Nation was exhibited at Spektrum Gallery in Berlin, Germany in November 2015